Reflecting on April 19, eighteen years ago

Up to April 19 back in 1994, the then prefecture {province} of Butare, now part of Rwandaâ€™s southern province, was still resisting participating in the genocide that claimed over 1 million Tutsi, while other parts of the country were two weeks old in their dangerous adventure of wiping the Tutsi ethnic group off the face of earth; 1994 genocide related movies and books can testify.

The book â€œRwanda: Death, Despair and Defianceâ€ by African Rights, confirms that there were already sporadic scenes of vandalism like looting cattle, individual killings in Butare, though no mass killing wasnâ€™t yet on a large scale and the idea of massacring the Tutsi was not yet practiced like in the rest of the country.

â€œButare was relatively calm, compared to other parts of the country,â€ the book quotes.

The same fateful afternoon, President Sindikubwabo addressed grassroot leaders in Butare on why the genocide was a necessity.

â€œWhoever says they are not concerned, itâ€™s high time they resigned from their official duties. There are enough other good workers who are ready to work for their countryâ€¦.So I would like you to get us right in what we say and make sense of our words, and then try to go deeper to get the meaning of our words. Try to understand why we prefer using one word and not another one, itâ€™s because we are in a state of emergencyâ€, Sindikubwabo is quoted to have said.

A shop-owner in Butare town by the time of the Genocide, she lost four of her six children during the Genocide. She was lucky to survive.

â€œSindikubwaboâ€™s speech scared us a lot. People started creating roadblocks outside our houses yet we couldnâ€™t get out because we were scared of being killed. Immediately after his speech, we knew it was over for all Tutsi,â€ Namana recalls.

Like many survivors in Butare, Namana pins Sindikubwabo for the loss of her four children to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.

â€œI think hadnâ€™t it been with that speech, maybe the killings could have happened but not with such vigor, in such a short while,â€ she adds.

As the â€œRwanda: Death, Despair and Defianceâ€ points out, hardly had Sindikubwabo finished giving the authoritative speech, than well-organized military assaults invaded Cyahinda parish {once in Butare but now in Nyaruguru district}. That very day, at least twenty thousand Tutsi were brutally massacred, Sindikubwaboâ€™s speech market the beginning of unsuccessful hiding of the Tutsi as they tried to dodge death, from their fellow countrymen.

The killings continued to Karama parish (still in todayâ€™s Nyaruguru district) where, according to the same book, between thirty-five and forty-three thousand Tutsi were killed a few days after.

Nevertheless, when interviewed in a Democratic Republic of Congo refugee camp, by Philip Gourevitch, an American war reporter and writer, aging Sindikubwabo said his words in Butare on April 19 in 1994, were taken out of context.

â€œIf the mayors of Butare affirm that the massacres began under my order, they are responsible because it was their responsibility to maintain order in their communities. If they interpreted my message as an order, they executed an order against my wordsâ€, Sindikubwabo is quoted to have said in Gourevitchâ€™s book,

Gourevitchâ€™s book, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families.